Vince Gilligan follows up Breaking Bad with a detective drama at CBS

Though the network is having a rough premiere week in the ratings race, CBS is still ruler of the roost in the broadcast network world, and it reminded everybody of that by picking up the first post-Breaking Bad project of Vince Gilligan, then tossing in Emmy-winning writer David Shore (best known for his work on House) as executive producer and showrunner for good measure, as if taunting all other networks to smell what Les Moonves is cooking. (Fittingly, CBS only knows wrestling taunts from the late ‘90s, because that’s when its core audience last changed the channel.)

The project, titled Battle Creek, received a straight-to-series order, according to Variety, and was actually developed in 2002, when Gilligan was fresh off his work on The X-Files. It’s a detective drama about two investigators who have very different worldviews, and it’s hard to see exactly why Gilligan would have come up with that idea in the wake of his work on X-Files. There’s no word on how big the order is, but Variety suggests it will be 13 episodes. The more procedural nature of the program will be a break from Breaking Bad, but Shore’s good at weaving more philosophical themes into a case-of-the-week structure, at least so long as he doesn’t have to do it eight seasons in a row. The series will debut at some point in the 2014-15 season.